Gear

Posts about hardware, software, or the tech industry itself

Adding memory to a MacBook Pro

I can never leave well enough alone. If 2 GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro is good, 4 GB of RAM would be better, right? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. So I set out to expand the memory of my new Macintosh, and have a few tidbits to share.

Can your MacBook Pro be expanded?

As I understand it, there have been a total of two “releases” of Intel-based MacBook Pro. The first came out late in 2006 and was in distribution until approximately June of 2007. That version used a version of the Intel chipset that, for reasons that remain unclear to me, could only address 3 GB of RAM. Note that you could *install* 4 GB, but that the machine itself wouldn’t actually use the memory above the 3 GB boundary due to mapping conflicts. I believe this first version of the MacBook Pro came with 1 GB of RAM standard.

Apple quietly updated the MacBook Pro during the June time frame of 2007. The new models use the Intel “Santa Rosa” chipset, and can now support up to 4 GB of RAM. These newer MacBook Pros come standard with 2 GB of RAM, with of the two slots in the machine filled (I.E.: two 1 GB SODIMM chips).

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Pictures of the new Baby…

I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a week now, thought it would be a good time to share some pictures.  Here she is:

 

This picture was taken the very first time I powered the machine on, after it had completed its initial setup.  The machine came pre-installed with OSX 10.4.10: the last version of OSX before Leopard.  I got a "free" upgrade to Leopard (just had to pay shipping and handling), and it arrived here yesterday.  Here’s how the Mac looks now with Leopard installed…

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Gettin’ jiggy with VMWare on the Mac

I mentioned earlier that I had installed VMWare Fusion on my MacBook.  One of my objectives with this was to be able to run Windows Live Writer on my Macintosh for editing this blog.

You might rightly point out that there are plenty of blog editors for the Macintosh, some of them reasonably good.  However…I’ve tried several of them, and they don’t work quite as well for my purposes as Live Writer does.  So…how did things go?

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Windows on Mac is Spooky

Everyone knows, of course, that you can run Windows applications on a Macintosh. When Macs started shipping with Intel processors this became almost a no brainer. Boot Camp is the most obvious way to achieve the “Windows on a Mac” experience, but is a bit of a brute force approach: when you boot your machine, it is either a Macintosh or a Windows based system, not both at the same time.

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.Mac Sync: down for 10 days and counting

I mentioned in my previous post that I have subscribed to .Mac, Apple’s online service for file sharing, email, and so forth.

One of the neat things .Mac can do is automatically synchronize your Mac’s address book, email, and calendar so that you can access it using a web browser on any computer. I was trying to figure out why my MacBook’s address book entries weren’t showing up in the .Mac web interface, and finally read the little notice on the site saying that synchronization was temporarily down.

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A Macintosh a day…

27 years ago, I bought an Apple II+. That was my first computer, and I have many fond memories of its 16 kilobyte wonder.

When the Macintosh came out in 1984, I really wanted one. Unfortunately, it was several thousand dollars too expensive, and I had already committed to spending several thousand dollars on a Unix based machine. Years went by: I bought an IBM compatible machine for business related reasons, and eventually ended up working almost exclusively with various types of non-Apple technology. Many Windows+Intel machines have taken their place in my home, and hundreds more have served their role in my place of work.

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Asus M2R32 motherboard: defective RAID/AHCI?

I mentioned in a previous post here that I picked up some additional hard drives.  The 750 GB drive is running happily in an external eSATA-connected enclosure and is providing backup for my machine.  The other two drives are sitting on a shelf, and will remain there indefinitely.  There is a story behind their banishment from my computer.  It isn’t that there is anything particularly wrong with the drives themselves: I’ve finally concluded that my Asus motherboard has crappy RAID/AHCI support.

I have spent the last couple of days repeatedly building and tearing down my machine.  First I built a RAID 1 array.  Bear in mind that the drives I’m using are good quality Seagate 7200.10 drives: they have full SATA2 support, including Native Command Queuing (NCQ).  The drives they displaced were high-end WD Raptor 1500ADFD drives: arguably, the Raptors are better drives, but I had suspicions that WD drives might be behind my problems putting my system into standby mode in Vista.  I was wrong.

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